Joe Espada’s job security has been one of the loudest debate points around the Astros, but the argument gets sharper when you strip away the noise and look at what he actually managed to produce.
The usual complaints are easy enough to find. Some fans think Espada has been trying to win with a roster that kept getting thinner, less dynamic and more banged up.
Others don’t like the way he has handled the lineup or the bullpen. And plenty of people still compare him unfavorably to Dusty Baker, believing Baker would have delivered better results.
But if you want to move past opinion and measure the job by the numbers, there’s a different way to look at it: total team talent, then how many wins the Astros turned out for that talent.
Using FanGraphs’ fWAR to estimate the club’s total production and dividing wins by that figure, the trend is hard to ignore. In 2021, the Astros posted 50.4 team WAR and won 95 games, which came out to 1.88 wins per WAR.
In 2022, they were at 57.4 WAR and 106 wins, or 1.85 wins per WAR. In 2023, the team finished with 45.3 WAR and 90 wins, for 1.99 wins per WAR.
That’s where the Dusty Baker years sit. And those numbers still line up with the kind of run the Astros made under him: a World Series trip in 2021, a title in 2022, and a Game 7 loss in the ALCS in 2023.
Then the roster starts to change, and the math shifts with it.
In 2024, the Astros’ total team WAR dropped to 39.9, while they still won 88 games. That worked out to 2.2 wins per WAR.
In 2025, the team WAR slid again to 37.3, with 87 wins and a 2.33 wins per WAR mark. And in 2026, the floor dropped even further: 28.8 team WAR, 81 wins, and a staggering 2.81 wins per WAR.
That decline in total WAR tells the story of a club that lost talent through free agency and injury and didn’t replace it with anything close to equivalent production. The roster got weaker, plain and simple. Yet the wins kept coming at a rate that says Espada was squeezing far more out of the group than the raw talent suggested was possible.
Espada won the division in 2024 and 2026, and the Astros missed the playoffs on a tiebreaker in 2025. More than that, he was getting better efficiency from a lesser roster than Baker had during his run.
Baker’s Astros lived in the 1.85 to 1.99 wins per WAR range. Espada’s teams were at 2.2 and 2.81.
That 2.81 figure in 2026 stands out the most. It suggests an Astros team that, by the numbers, had no business being even a .500 club. The source of that strain, as presented here, was not just the roster’s construction and the injuries, but also the inability of GM Dana Brown to improve it, whether because he lacked the ability, the authority or both.
Espada was expected to meet with owner Jim Crane shortly after the season ended, and his fate was to be decided soon after. But if the argument comes down to what he was handed and what he produced, the math points one way.
He earned the job.
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What makes it sting for Houston is not just that Harris settled in elsewhere, but that his improvement came while the Astros continued to cycle through possibilities and never solidify the position. San Diego benefited from the depth, Houston did not, and the gap showed up in the standings as the Astros fell short of the playoffs with left field still lingering as one of the rosters biggest unresolved issues. [Read more 🡒]